Posts Tagged:
SSERVI

NASA has selected eight teams to collaborate on research into the intersection of space science and human space exploration as part of the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI). Among the teams is the CU Boulder and LASP-led Institute for Modeling Plasmas, Atmospheres, and Cosmic Dust (IMPACT).

The IMPACT center, led by LASP scientist and CU Boulder professor of physics, Mihály Horányi, is an international collaboration that includes partners from the CU Boulder departments of physics and aerospace engineering sciences, LASP, and the Colorado School of Mines. The focus of IMPACT center research is the dusty plasma environments around the moon and other airless bodies in the solar system.

Researchers at CU Boulder will soon set their sights on the heliosphere, a massive bubble in space that surrounds our solar system and shields it from incoming radiation.

NASA’s recently announced Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission, which is slated to launch in 2024, will hover close to one million miles from Earth where it will observe the outermost edges of the solar system—the limits of our Sun’s influence on space.

LASP will play a major role in the nearly $500 million mission by leading IMAP’s scientific operations and designing an instrument that will fly on the spacecraft, detecting tiny particles of dust that flow through space.

Wearing latex gloves and focused expressions, a group of middle school students gathered around a large cardboard tube recently at the CU Boulder Engineering Center then carefully began wrapping it in fiberglass. All the while, an undergraduate with the CU Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (CU SEDS) organization explained how rockets are designed and built.

Soon, these same students will travel to southern Colorado to launch a rocket they helped assemble as part of a CU Junior Aerospace Engineering Camp. This camp, in particular, brought students to campus from Casa de la Esperanza, a housing community in Longmont for agricultural workers and their families.